Both a post-#MeToo reckoning and a speculative account of the sort of behavior that could have transpired on billionaire Jeffrey Epstien’s island, Blink Twice — which elected to not be this year’s Cocaine Bear after it changed its title from the more provocative but considerably harder to market Pussy Island — is simultaneously of the moment and at least half a decade past its sell-by date. Co-written and directed by actress-turned-filmmaker Zoë Kravitz and staring her offscreen partner Channing Tatum as the film’s primary antagonist, Blink Twice pulses with righteous anger at a pervasive culture of wealthy and powerful men exploiting women practically as sport only to be given a pass by appropriating the language of therapy and cynical public apologies. The film is aware of, and has internalized, the entire “it’s actually about trauma” genre movie discourse, which may be the problem with it. There’s no shortage of ideas to chew on in Blink Twice, and one can tell that Kravitz and her collaborators have put the time and effort in; exploring how obscene amounts of money, access, and an aspirational, Instagram-influenced lifestyle steers young women into dangerous situations. But it also feels terminally online and isn’t above leaning on buzz phrases like “believe women” as both a battle cry and an ironic punchline. It’s the sort of film that’s more successful as a treatise on gender roles and cycles of abuse than as a work of drama.
We’re introduced to the film’s hero, Frida (Naomi Ackie), seated on the porcelain throne in her dreary apartment, fawning over Internet videos of tech billionaire and scandal-plagued heartthrob Slater King (Tatum). Fresh from his latest PR misstep — the details are kept intentionally vague — we find him on the apology tour, pledging to “do better” while pulling back from public life so he can spend more time on his private island. Slater is obviously full of shit even by unctuous, digital-entrepreneur standards — Tatum looks as though he has some sort of dental prosthesis, which makes his toothy grin even more pronounced — but Frida is helplessly smitten. As luck would have it, she’s scheduled to work a black-tie fundraiser being held in his honor that very evening, and she’s not about to let being but a “lowly” cocktail waitress stop her from crossing to the other side of the velvet rope and rubbing elbows with the rich and beautiful. Along with her roommate and partner in mischief, Jess (Alia Shawkat, in a role she could play in her sleep while still lending it a dependable pragmatism), Frida dons a slinky gown and heels, and faster than you can say “meet cute” she’s being rescued from a public embarrassment by none other than Slater himself. In true fairytale fashion, he’s transfixed by her, leading her by the hand and introducing her and Jess to his entourage of longtime friends and hangers-on (none of whom have a personality to speak of but are portrayed by the likes of Simon Rex, Christian Slater, and Haley Joel Osment). In a room full of titans of industry, Slater is singularly consumed with Frida, and as the night comes to a close, he makes a proposition that would have been inconceivable only 24 hours earlier: will Jess and her accompany him and his friends on his private jet to partake in a days-long bacchanal on his tropical island? Fuck stranger danger, where do they stow their luggage?
Staying at Slater’s sprawling villa, Frida and Jess are joined by three other women, most notably perpetual reality show contestant Sarah (Adria Arjona, of early summer’s Hit Man), and after relinquishing their cell phones — house rules — the ladies are led to their rooms where they find color-coordinated clothing, high-thread-count sheets on their beds, exotic perfume, and assorted sundries. After changing into their provided designer swimwear, the women are plied with champagne and cannabis, are fed freshly prepared gourmet food, flirt endlessly while lounging by the pool, and partake in MDMA-fueled revelry until the wee hours of the morning. And yet, for all the chemical substances imbibed, exposed skin, and total isolation, the boys are remarkably well-behaved, with everyone retreating to their own bedrooms at the end of each night only for the never-ceasing party to resume where it left off the next morning. It all feels like heaven, and for much of the film — far too much of it, in fact — Blink Twice resembles something between influencer sponcon and an extremely sanitized version of MTV’s Spring Break, with Kravitz treating the subject matter like an aspirational playground with more than a hint of wealth porn. There are, however, stray signs that something is amiss. There are the unexplained bruises on Sarah’s arm and gunk discovered under Frida’s lovingly maintained nails. We see dirty bottoms of feet, and why do all the flashes we get of nighttime activities involve the women running with reckless abandon? There’s also the sensation of lost time (tellingly, nobody ever brings up having to return to the mainland to report to a job or reconnect with loved ones), which Kravitz emphasizes by toying with the film’s chronology and continuity. But then, Jess disappears without explanation, which is plenty odd although not so strange as it taking Frida half a day to realize it. Or that nobody else on the island even remembers Jess.
Needless to say — the film being a studio-thriller and all — something sinister is afoot. Outward appearances notwithstanding, Slater and his dot-com bros are clearly no choir boys, although the exact nature of what’s happening is best left to be discovered (the film’s distributor, Amazon MGM Studios, just made the possibly self-serving decision to issue a trigger warning in advance of the film’s release — make of that what you will). However, it’s fair to mention that memory repression plays a large role in Slater’s grand design, and, in a clever bit of form matching subject, Kravitz follows suit, eliding exactly what’s been going on underneath our noses for the majority of the film only to belatedly drop the hammer in a series of genuinely upsetting flashbacks. It’s an admirably perverse choice from a first-time filmmaker, but it does present something of a conundrum: if the characters don’t know anything is wrong… how are they supposed to know something is wrong?
The charitable interpretation is that Kravitz is attempting to depict women’s intuition or, to use another term that’s lost much of its meaning in the past decade, the experience of being gaslit. Like Frida, the viewer can sense something is “off,” as evidenced by her persistent nosebleeds, the prevalence of poisonous vipers slithering around the premises, the armed security goon lurking about, and that Slater’s long-in-the-tooth personal assistant (Geena Davis, having a grand old time sending up her own leggy-starlet past) is keeping their phones in a giant locked armoire. Or how about simply that the past decade has conditioned us that rich guys who are constantly snapping polaroids, wear fedoras, and are way too into crypto are rarely to be trusted. However, in the absence of concrete incident, much of the film amounts to Frida and Sarah trying to work out why their all-expenses-paid good time in paradise actually isn’t such a good time. Blink Twice willingly invites comparisons to Jordan Peele’s Get Out in that they’re both dystopian satires that use an inviting surface to conceal systemic rot just beyond our field of vision. However, structurally, the two films couldn’t be more different: it’s not really possible to allow microaggressions to accumulate and curdle if somebody is cutting away all the disquieting bits, leaving nothing but good vibes and a large vacant space where anxieties should be.
In addition to all the temporal gamesmanship, Kravitz primarily relies on an aggressive sound design to generate unease with seemingly innocuous sounds like hitting a vape or raucous laughter being jarringly foregrounded in the mix. It all speaks to her willingness to use film grammar to convey unease and creeping dread, which augurs well for her future as a director should she choose to pursue this as a career. But the Blink Twice screenplay is clumsy in its construction — the film’s solution for how our characters restore their stolen memories is only slightly more imaginative than if a magic wand were suddenly introduced — contrived in its plot machinations and ultimately so theme-first that by kicking that can down the road for as long as it does it becomes an awfully large bill come due in the third act. Eventually, we’re left with bodies strewn about the estate and Slater, having dropped his goofball chivalry mask, monologuing about the necessity of emotional compartmentalization and the fallacy of forgiveness, exemplified by screaming “I’m sorry” over and over again as a menacing pantomime of contrition. And what are we to make of the glib note the film concludes on, which seems to be arguing that the best revenge is upward mobility, subjugation, and literally appropriating the tactics of your victimizer? Suddenly, it feels like we’re back in 2017, where merely saying #girlboss still functions as a mic drop.
DIRECTOR: Zoë Kravitz; CAST: Naomi Ackie, Channing Tatum, Simon Rex, Christian Slate, Adria Arjona; DISTRIBUTOR: Amazon MGM Studios; IN THEATERS: August 23; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 42 min.
Comments are closed.